Mamma mia! Investigating crimes against Italian food.

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.

Quiz question for Italian readers: Which is the bigger food crime?

a) cream in a carbonara
b) cappuccino after late morning
c) pineapple on pizza

Answers on a postcard to the supermarket in the European Parliament and/or the International Criminal Court.

It’s been a challenging week for Italian foodstuffs. Italy’s agriculture minister, Francesco Lollobrigida, was livid when he saw a jar of carbonara sauce on the shelves of the Delhaize store inside the Parliament in Brussels that contained pancetta rather than guanciale — the cheek of it! (Guanciale is pork cheek, get it? No? Oh.)

Lollobrigida said such products represent the “worst of ‘Italian-sounding’” foodstuffs and called for an “immediate investigation.” Thank goodness there isn’t a war (or several) going on.

That said, passing off food as Italian is a big financial deal. Agricultural group Coldiretti reckons the “scandal of fake Italian products” costs the country €120 billion a year. Italy has also applied for Italian cuisine to be included in UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list (which basically means you can’t f**k with it). On a side note, already on the UNESCO list is “shrimp fishing on horseback” in Oostduinkerke, Belgium. I didn’t know shrimp could ride horses!

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party plans to write to Parliament President Roberta Metsola to complain about the use of the Italian flag on the offending jar of pasta sauce. Mind you, Meloni’s party is the Brothers of Italy and — shock — they are not all brothers!

“On the record: no one should put carbonara in a jar,” Metsola’s spokesperson told my colleagues at Brussels Playbook, in what may or may not have been a reference to the 1980s film “Dirty Dancing.” However, Metsola’s team pointed out that while food labeling is an EU competence, it is not the Parliament president’s job to intervene. As we all know, the Parliament president’s actual job is to, er, let’s circle back on that one.

The battle over Italian cuisine is not just being fought on the shelves of the Parliament’s in-house supermarket, of course. The European Commission is to present a list of sectors that it wants exempted from U.S. tariffs, and that will likely include pasta. Donald Trump loves Italian food, which we know because he made a genuinely horrific advert for Pizza Hut in the 1990s in which he ate the crust first. Shudder.

Trump’s Italian cousin — in deed if not by blood — is Silvio Berlusconi, who was a vocal defender of his country’s food.

In the early 2000s, negotiations were being held to decide on the location of the European Food Safety Authority, with Parma and Helsinki as the competitors. Berlusconi was unknowingly overheard saying that Finnish food was inedible and disgusting and that he could barely endure it during his visits to the north. “Finns only eat marinated reindeer meat! They don’t even know what prosciutto is,” Berlusconi said.

That’s nonsense, everyone knows that prosciutto is sparkling wine!

CAPTION COMPETITION

“Frenchman stumped when asked how many prime ministers he has appointed this month.”

Can you do better? Email us at pdallison@politico.eu or get in touch on X @POLITICOEurope.

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Thanks for all the entries. Here’s the best one from our mailbag — there’s no prize except the gift of laughter, which I think we can all agree is far preferable to cash or booze.

“Don’t let yourselves be fooled. He also is more intelligent than he looks (just like me).”

by Gregor Pozniak